Ex-Sun Micro CEO Jonathan Schwartz unveils startup

Let's start with this: Jonathan Schwartz knew that the sale of Sun Microsystems was inevitable. Schwartz, you may recall, was Sun's last chief executive -- the guy who in 2006 inherited control of a trailblazing company that had seen better days.

He was full of personality until his departure, which he announced in a haiku tweet, but he acknowledges that there wasn't much he could have done to reverse the slide that eventually led to Oracle's 2009 deal to buy the company for $7.4 billion. Could Schwartz have slowed Sun's decline? Sure. But stopped it? Not likely. "The thing we could not have predicted is the rate at which the financial crisis destroyed our business," Schwartz said in an interview.

About a third of Sun's customers were major financial institutions, many of them using Sun servers that cost more than $100,000. They were built on the company's own Sparc chips. And once those companies stopped buying, and others left the fold for cheaper Intel- and AMD-based alternatives, Sun went into a downward spiral.

"That business," he said, "was irretrievable." Schwartz obligingly talked about his final, difficult days at Sun because, after more than a year of work, he's finally taking the wraps off his new venture, a healthcare site called CareZone.

That's the trade-off a well-known executive is usually happy to make: I'll let you pick at the carcass of my old company, if you're willing to talk about what I'm doing now. "You had a one-way transition off Sparc, and that business was irretrievable," Schwartz said.

That CareZone is running on Amazon's hosting service is more proof that transition from high-end servers to cheap network gear was inevitable. After the sale of Sun, after a few months off to get his "head straight," Schwartz started talking about what he wanted to do next with longtime friend Walter Smith, who worked on the Newton OS at Apple and later worked on Windows, Internet Explorer, and MSN at Microsoft.

The answer: a subscription-based health care site that would allow customers to keep track of the medical needs of the people for whom they care. The concept may sound simple, but the need is significant, said Schwartz, who has two kids and two parents in their 80s.

How do you keep track of their medications, their medical visits, even their legal documents, beyond a mishmash of Word documents and sticky notes? The answer, Schwartz believes, is his site, whose simple interface enables easy information tracking and sharing.